One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Monday, December 15, 2014

December 15, 2014: Semester Recaps: The American Novel

[The Fall
2014 semester is coming to a close, and as usual I wanted to end the
semester with some reflections on my courses and other conversations, leading
up to a weekend post on some anticipations of spring (and not just the season;
although, yes). I’d love to hear some of your Fall 2014 reflections in
comments!]

On endings,
happy, sad, and perfect.

For purposes of
syllabus structure and helping us move through 150 years of texts and their
contexts, I break my American Novel to 1950 class up into three sections:
Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Such categorizations are, as always, at
least somewhat forced and inexact: for example, my first Romantic text, The
House of the Seven Gables(1851), pretty clearly fits (Hawthorne
identifies his novel as a Romance in his famous Preface); while
my second, Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn(1884), is a lot trickier to connect to that genre
or movement and certainly relates just as closely to realism and its various
sub-genres such as local
color/regionalism. But the categories help the students think about that
very question (how we categorize and define novels and their genres)—and, as I
was reminded this semester, they also can help me come to new ideas about these
works I’ve read and taught many times.

The new idea
that struck me most forcefully this time around has to do with the novels’
endings (long a subject of
literary critical investigation). Despite their many differences, both of
those Romantic novels come to strikingly and (to this reader, and to many
students as well) frustratingly happy endings, too-neat resolutions that tie up
virtually all their historical, social, and thematic conflicts and send their
protagonists off into a feel-good future. Similarly, despite their own
significant differences, both of our Realistic novels (Chopin’s
The Awakening and Cahan’s
The Rise of David Levinsky) end
on far more negative and even tragic notes, their protagonists feeling hopelessly
pessimistic about not only their futures but their very identities (the last book of Cahan’s
novel is titled “Episodes of a Lonely Life,” which could describe Chopin’s
culmating section as well). And it seems to me that these respective kinds of
endings are at least somewhat necessary for these two genres, and thus that one
way to make sense of Twain’s notoriously
controversial ending is to see it as a retreat into the more Romantic
aspects of a novel that has featured plenty of realistic elements as well.

Perhaps it’s
because I had been thinking about these questions of endings throughout our
first two units; but in any case, when we got to our fifth novel and first
Modernist text, Cather’s
My Antonia (1918), I was even
more affected by its ending, which I have long found to be among the most
beautiful in American literature. On the one hand, the ending’s lyrical description
of her novel’s Nebraska setting echoes multiple moments from throughout the
text, especially those located at or near the end of its structuring Books
(including Book II’s famous plough
and sun description). But on another, the ending’s true power depends on
where we, along with our narrator Jim Burden and his lifelong friend Antonia
Shimerda, have arrived; it’s a moment defined equally for me, as is Jim’s
appreciation of the Nebraska landscape, by a Romantic temperament and a
Realistic subject, by the intimate details of Antonia’s life as an immigrant on
the frontier and by the sweeping lens of Jim’s love and admiration for her. Perhaps
this ending’s perfection, that is, is due to its combination of categories—a combination
that, like Antonia’s story, feels particularly American.

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: